KING Art has released a new dev blog discussings some of the elements in its upcoming point and click adventure, The Raven - Legacy of a Master Thief. Published by Nordic Games and scheduled for a July 23 release, the game will revolve around the player's attempts to capture an art thief in 1960's Europe. Nordic previously worked with KING Art to launch The Book of Unwritten Tales.

Realistic puzzles: In the development of the story and puzzles, we put realistic puzzles right at the top of our list of priorities. We didn’t want any contrived or artificial puzzles in the game. In The Raven, you don’t have to solve a chess problem to open a drawer. ;-) Every puzzle or problem in the game should arise naturally from the story. And the solution to those problems should also be realistic – or let’s say “Hollywood realistic.” You also can’t just stick an axe or a fire extinguisher in your pocket. For us, this was and is an experiment to find out if serious adventures can stand to have more realism. We think they can – but it is a heck of a lot of work.

Real-time 3D: All of our adventures so far have had pre-rendered backgrounds and real-time characters. In The Raven, everything consists of real-time objects for the first time. That means we are able to position any number of cameras and can also work with tracking shots and panning. We didn’t overdo it, but in those places where those things are useful, we used them. We hope the effort was worth it. In comparison to The Book of Unwritten Tales, we not only put a lot more time into every character and every location, we also created around 5 times as many animations as in BoUT and integrated them into the game.